My Story

  

My Ayurveda journey really started back in 2016.

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I had been struggling with digestive issues for my entire life but it kind of ran in my family so I just thought that was how I was and would always be. 

 

I learned about my lactose intolerance a few years prior, which drastically changed my life, and then learned that I also carry the Celiac gene. After cutting out gluten and dairy from my diet I saw crazy results. Like results I didn't think were possible results. I was no longer in immense amounts of continuous pain and discomfort. 

 

Let me backup for a second… all the way back to high school. So I have always had a passion for cooking. I’m talking about a weird passion that I was born with because I started watching the food network before I can even remember.

 

During this time in my life I started cooking a lot. I got my first payroll job at 16 so I would go to the grocery store and get stuff to cook for the whole family for dinner. It was a great time and I loved sharing all of the things I had absorbed throughout the years of learning from Emeril Lagassi and Paula Dean. Can you guess what this diet primarily consisted of?

 

If you said dairy and gluten then you would be correct. I didn’t know what I was doing to myself. I hadn’t yet learned about my food intolerances. I was just making yummy food ok. Sharing my passion with my loved ones. 

 

My food was delicious, don't get it twisted, still is even with the more than drastic changes I have made to the ingredients. But I was unwittingly making my symptoms worse and worse. My mom grew us up on things like chicken and rice and even though we still had our Little Debbie cakes and pudding snack packs my diet was healthier than it became when I took the reigns. I spent the entirety of my teenage years feeling like I was a balloon ready to pop.

 

I was beyond bloated. Like ALL the time! Coupled with the bloat, as if that wasn’t enough, was the crazy pain of bricks in my bowels because I was so flippin constipated.

 

I remember looking around the room at the other kids in class thinking “Is this how everyone feels all the time and nobody is talking about it?” 

 

Listen, I know first hand what it is like to be a mystery to yourself.

That is how I lived for a very long time.

 

I was always wondering what was wrong with me.

 

Why I felt the way I did.

 

Why I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without fear and pain… like what?

 

Not only that, but the shame I felt around not feeling as though I was functioning properly prevented me from sharing what I was experiencing with those who could help. 

 

It wasn’t until that summer in 2016 where I was broken, hopeless and depressed when I decided there had to be a better way. Sure cutting out the dairy and gluten had helped greatly reduce my bloat and constipation but the pain was still there. I had let my symptoms persist for so long that they had manifested into something else, a giant ovarian cyst the size of my fist.

 

My body was trying to get my attention. Dying to actually. I was in literal shock when I found out and then the surgeon said “I won’t know anything about it until after the surgery. I also don’t know if I will be able to get it all out without taking the entire ovary. We won’t know until we are inside.”

 

Bam… like a ton of bricks. I had never received this type of information before and I was blindly going through the motions.

 

It was honestly as if someone else had taken over my life and I was on autopilot.

 

When I look back on those memories it is like watching a movie where someone else is playing my star roll.

 

I was desperate for answers. And after my surgery proved to be unsuccessful, I was desperate for changes. Yes I got to keep both of my ovaries, no I did not have cancer. But what I did have was a bunch of unanswered questions. 

 

You see for the year that followed that surgery I knew something was not right inside my body. I went back to my surgeon for tests only to be told that I was still healing and what I was feeling was normal. WRONG!

 

After almost a year of trying to get someone, in that office and others, to actually take some images and double check what was really going on inside I decided to reach for another option.

 

I decided I wasn’t giving up.

 

I had lost my parents health insurance by this point and everything was out of pocket so I was being conservative before. But my health couldn’t afford me to be conservative anymore. 

 

I went to another specialist, this time in the city, and this time with a long list of recommendations. I got my tests done that very day after being told, “I think you know your body better than me so let’s do an ultrasound.” (THESE ARE THE MAGIC WORDS PEOPLE) My tests revealed what I had been fearing. The cysts were back. Tenfold. My entire reproductive system was riddled with cysts. PCOS. Ok now to make this very long story shorter I will just say I tried their prescribed drugs with no positive results and then got told to try surgery again. Um that was a very quick hard NO!

 

So it was up to me. 

 

I did the elimination diet thing which turned into a borderline eating disorder because I felt better when I didn’t eat than I did when I ate. I didn’t know that even though I wasn’t eating dairy or gluten I was still consuming a lot of things that were not good for my body type. They may have been “healthy foods” but they were not healthy for me in my condition. 

 

Enter Ayurveda and my life is literally saved.

 

Now I do want to point out here that at no point in my interaction with western medicine did they ever even mention anything about diet, let alone ask me about mine. I will leave it at that. 

 

My friend introduced me to Ayurveda and I have been hooked ever since. This is the only thing in my life that I have been able to study, apply instantly and then see immediate positive results. 

 

I am often asked if my digestion and health are somehow perfect now that I have learned about Ayurveda and been implementing its practices for several years. My answer is no, my body is still not perfect. But I understand that this is in my control.

 

I also understand that when I am not feeling my best I can target the exact reason why. I am a human. I still do things that aren't best for me sometimes and I have to deal with the outcome. But I will say this, that I do not experience that daily pain and discomfort that haunted me for the entirety of my early childhood and adult years. 

 

I also know how to care for myself better than I ever imagined. Ayurveda has taught me to accept myself for who I am, the way that I am, because I AM! That doesn’t mean that I have to remain the way that I am. Seeing these things gives me the power to be able to make the changes I want to make. 

 

It goes like this.

See it. Understand it.  Love it. Adjust it. 

 

This has been a long journey for me and my health.

 

Ayurveda is a lifestyle not a bandaid.

I am continuously making changes to my daily routine and I know that I will always have to be malleable and willing to make changes as I mature in this life.

 

The only thing is that I wish I knew about this from day one when I arrived on this planet. I wish I was handed the Ayurveda book and told that it would be my health handbook throughout my entire life. That is the thing about Ayurveda, it evolves with you. It grows with you. It meets you where you are. Wherever you are. 

 

Ayurveda taught me, this is my favorite thing, that I am not a giant mystery afterall. 

 

Others aren’t a mystery to me anymore either, most of them anyways.  Now when I meet a new person I often know more about them before they even open their mouth than I could ever know based off of what they tell me. That is the funny thing about humans, we often believe things the way we want them to be instead of the way they actually are.

 

Not only that, but we often also share things with others in a way that makes things appear in our favor. That is not a bad thing, it's just how we are. But now with Ayurveda I can see it and I have way more compassion with others when they share things that I know to be skewed or untrue. 

 

So to wrap this up…

 

Hey I’m Autumn, I’m a girl from Georgia who fell in love with Ayurveda when I lost all hope in loving myself. 

I went from hating myself and my existence to learning how to love this beautifully crazy thing we call life.

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I like to spend time in nature with my doggos and teach people how to understand themselves. 

I have a pretty sick tool belt in my arsenal equipped with Ayurveda, chakras, crystals, plants and yummy foods.

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You got a problem? 

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Let me check my belt.

I bet I got a tool for that.